IDC forecasts server market to limp along in 2010

Server shipments in the UK are forecast to grow marginally in 2010 with the General Election a destabilising factor for an economy that is out of intensive care but has yet to fully recover.

According to IDC, unit sales are predicted to grow just 0.8% to a little over 300,000 while the market is expected to generate revenues of $1.9bn (£1.26bn), up 1.6% on last year.

The banking industry led the revival of UK shipments in Q4 but analysts reiterated previous warnings about the downturn in the public sector, one which continued spending during the recession and provided a boon for many resellers to cling to.

"We anticipate a lack of spending in the public sector, with the General Election in May a lot of investment projects are being put on standby," said Nathaniel Martinez, director of European server research at IDC.

Aside from an uptick in spending in the finance sector, the rest of the economy had not yet dramatically improved, he added and as one of the major early adopters of virtualisation, many in the UK continued to use the software to sweat their assets.

The relatively higher rise in market revenues is due to customers transitioning to machines built on AMD and Intel's next generation of server chips.

"Organisations that are looking at modernising Business Intelligence and CRM applications will buy four-socket x86 systems," said Martinez.

The outlook for Western Europe is markedly better than the UK according to the analyst house, with revenues forecast to grow 2.1% to $10.6bn and unit shipments of 1.6 million, up 21% over 2009.

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